Preview of Norton & Toohey (2001) and Norton (2006)

Changing Perspectives on Good Language Learners Norton & Toohey (2001)

Summary

Early Studies
Researchers had hypothesis that language learning activities of successful learners were different from poorer learners. Among many studies, the representative work is The Good Language Learner (The GLL; Naiman, Frôhlich, Stern, & Todesco, 1978).

As Larsen-Freeman commented in 1991, SLA researchers until that time were trying to find out "the cognitive processes of language learning acquisition and the effects of learners' characteristics on these processes." They did not pay attention to "the situated experience of learners."

Increasing Interest in Sociological and Anthropological Aspects of SLA ~ since the mid-1990s~
The focus on characteristics of much psychological SLA research were needed to be shifted to "activities and settings and the learning that inevitably accompanies social practice."

Pioneers
①L. L. Vygotsky (1978) emphasizes on the significance of "social contexts in processes of acculturation, whereby more experienced participants in a culture bring the 'intellectual tools of society'".
② M. M. Bakhtin (1981) sees that language learners learn to speak by imitating people's utterances and gradually internalize them as those of their own.

Key Concepts
① The notion of community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991): Language learners participate in "particular, local contexts in which specific practices create possibilities for them to learn" the target languages.

② The identify and human agency of the language learner: researchers note that the conditions in which language learners are "often challenging, engaging their identities in complex and often contradictory ways."

③ The notion of investment: when learners invest in an L2, they do so because they expect to be successful users of the target language(s). And this will eventually "enhance their conception of themselves and their desires for the future."


Second Language Identity (Norton, 2006)

Summary

The Historical Context
① In the 1970s and 1980s: second language identity tended to distinguish between social identity and cultural identity.
② In the 1990s : second language identity is taken as socioculturally constructed.(interdisciplinary approach)
③ Currently : sees second language identity as "dynamic, contradictory, and constantly changing across time and place."

Key Words
Social Identity: "seen to reference the relationship between the individual language learner and the larger social world, as mediated through institutions such as families, schools, workplaces, social services, and law courts."
Cultural Identity: "referenced the relationship between an individual and members of a particular ethnic group (such as Mexican and Japanese) who share common history, a common language, and similar ways of understanding the world."

Research Trajectories
①Identity and Investment (see the summary of the previous article)

②Identity and Imagined Communities
The communities created by many language learners' imagination. It is a desired community which gives possibilities for "an enhanced range of identity options in the future." The community may also be a reconstruction of past communities and historically constructed relationships to some extent. Thus, an imagined community produces an imagined identity, and a language learner's investment in the target language should be seen within this context.

③Identity Categories and Educational Change
Much research on second language identity looks into the multiple and intersecting dimensions of learner's identities. In addition, there is a increasing number of research which tries to investigate the ways in which particular relations of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation may impact on the language learning process. Innovative research that deals with these issues does not take such identity categories as variables, but rather as "sets of relationships that are socially and historically constructed within particular relations of power."

④Identity and Literacy
Researchers of second language identity have come to be interested in learners' literacy as well as oracy. For instance, Norton Peirce and Stein (1995) argues that the changing social occasions created different kinds of investments on the part of language learners, and the learner identities changed, so did their interpretation of the text.

Reflection
These articles show how sociocultural aspects came to be taken into consideration in the field of SLA. I, myself, also believe that they are crucial to foreign language (in my case) acquisition from my own experience, I was persuaded by the notions/theories/the results of many studies while reading the two articles.

For instance, I created my own imagined community when I started to learn EFL in Japan. In such community, I thought of myself to be a successful learner of the target language. In short, my own creation of the imagined community motivated me to learn English. Consequently, I invested a lot of time and energy in the learning of English.

Also, as some of the studies mention, my communities of practice have been more than one, such as school, workplace, and the host families' houses during study abroad period. Naturally, I have had more than one identity categories and they have influenced me not separately but in complex ways.

The new concept I learned in the second article was that there was a close relationship between identity and literacy. It is certainly true that investment or interpretation of the SL text would change according to the changing social conditions.

I would like you to share your personal experiences/the impressive memories of other SL/FL learners on second language identity.